Category Archives: Computing

Denver will play host next week to the first technical summit of The Green Grid, a non-profit consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in computer data centers.

Energy use is a growing concern for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other big computer users, which are building huge data centers around the globe to handle soaring demand for broadband Internet services. Google engineer Luiz André Barroso has predicted, in fact, that energy costs may soon surpass the cost of computing equipment for large users.

The April 18-19 Green Grid event is expected to bring together leading technical experts from founding companies AMD, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. Longmont-based Copan Systems, Inc., a privately held maker of energy-efficient disk storage sysytems, was one of nearly 30 additional new members announced this week, including Brocade Communications, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Novell, QLogic, Texas Instruments and others.

This will be the first event for the organization since its launch this February. The two-day summit’s three main goals are: how to define and measure data-center efficiency, how to build more efficient data centers and how to improve the efficiency of daily operations.

EE Timesreports that one possible solution the group may debate is shifting data centers from AC to DC power. While Intel has been touting that idea recently, Google has been pushing another approach calling for the computer industry to replace a wide variety of multi-voltage power supplies with standard, more efficient 12-volt power supplies.

Last week the company was featured in a Wall Street Journal article describing how the latest computer processor chips from Intel and AMD offer new ways to protect servers from computer viruses and other attacks. The article quotes Colorado State University computer-science professor Daniel Massey, who has been running the Secure64 software for more than a year, as saying: “nobody can get into this box.”

Another article this week in SEO/SEM Journal examines, but does not confirm, the company’s claim to offer the world’s only “genuinely secure” operating system. Other recent coverage of the company has appeared in Network World, c/net and The Register.

Secure64 claims that its $9,995 Secure64 DNS software — the initial version of which runs only on Itanium-based Hewlett-Packard Integrity rx2660 computers — can withstand denial-of-service attacks while still responding to more than 100,000 legitimate queries per second.

The software, which has several patents pending, protects domain name system (DNS) Internet directories while allowing users to manage email, web access and e-commerce services.

It’s no accident that Secure64’s first products target HP’s Itanium-based servers. The company’s chief technology officer, William Worley, was an HP Fellow and chief scientist and one of the key architects of Itanium technology, which was developed in Fort Collins.

The company, which started in 2002 and now has 23 employees, has raised $7.5 million in angel funding and reportedly plans to seek $5 million to $10 million in additional funds soon.